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Earth has been trapping heat at an alarming new rate, study finds:
The amount of heat trapped by Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere doubled over the course of just 14 years, a new study shows.
To figure out how much heat the earth was trapping, researchers looked at NASA satellite measurements that tracked how much of the Sun's energy was entering Earth's atmosphere and how much was being bounced back into space. They compared this with data from NOAA buoys that tracked ocean temperatures — which gives them an idea of how much heat is getting absorbed into the ocean.
The difference between the amount of heat absorbed by Earth, and the amount reflected back into space is called an energy imbalance. In this case, they found that from 2005 to 2019, the amount of heat absorbed by Earth was going up.
[...] The researchers think that the reason the Earth is holding on to more heat comes down to a few different factors. One is human-caused climate change. Among other problems, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more heat they trap. It gets worse when you take into account that increasing heat also melts ice and snow. Ice and snow can help the planet reflect heat back into space — as they disappear, more heat can be absorbed by the land and oceans underneath.
There's another factor at play too — natural changes to a climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Between 2014 and 2019, the pattern was in a 'warm phase' which caused fewer clouds to form. That also meant more heat could be absorbed by the oceans.
Journal Reference:
Norman G. Loeb, Gregory C. Johnson, Tyler J. Thorsen, et al. Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth's Heating Rate, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2021GL093047)
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Sunday June 27 2021, @04:01PM
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Now this cuts to the heart of our disagreement! A much more appropriate metaphor here would be a race. Because we're trying to catch up to a moving target, and any break we take - it moves (relatively speaking) even faster away, leaving us ever further behind. Last year we engaged in a colossal sprint giving it all we can had and then some. And we closed 5% of the distance. Except now as we're bent over trying to catch our breath, our target is racing away faster than ever. And that 5% will probably fall to around 2% this year, and by next year he'll be further away than ever.
I absolutely agree with you that technology can provide benefits in efficiency. Yet those benefits are overshadowed by our continuing monumental growth and consumption. Consider that the US population has increased by 32% since 1990. So even if we managed to drop our per capita emissions by 32%, there'd have been exactly 0 improvement. And alongside population growth is also increased consumption and development driving ever greater emissions.
And we're in a country with a best case scenario since we have low fertility, people who care, lots of money and some of the highest [wikipedia.org] per capita emissions in in the world. Think about somewhere like India or Africa. India has about 1/8th our emissions, [Sub-Saharan] Africa about 1/20th. As these regions develop, it's basically impossible for their emissions to go anywhere but up. And the development of these regions will have a dramatic impact on our global emissions due to their population: about 1.4 billion in India, 1.1 billion in Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is not a problem you're going to socially solve or even make significant inroads into.